Lists of stop words are used in many text analysis applications to eliminate non-content bearing words from analysis in order to improve results and accelerate processing. Elimination of stop words can have significant impact on analyses. However, formal methods associated with the automatic creation of these lists are rare. Typically, stop word lists are hand crafted to particular deployments and applications. In some cases applications enable users to modify stop lists based on their own assessments. Accordingly, a need exists for methods and apparatus for automatic generation of stop word lists.